I didn't know. I wished I did. Of course, when you watch a lion trying
to get at you from behind a fairly strong cage you feel perfectly safe,
but you feel safer when you are somewhere else, just the same. We got
out on the pavement and gave a gentle whistle.
"Aye har yu!" roared Ole, coming through a chicken yard. "Aye har yu,
you leetle Baked Pies! Aye gat yu purty soon. Yust vait."
We didn't wait. We put on a little more gasoline and started for the
frat house. We didn't have to whistle any more. Ole was right behind us.
We could hear him thundering on the pavement and pleading with us in
that rich, nutty dialect of his to stop and have our heads pounded on
the bricks.
I shudder yet when I think of all the things he promised to do to us. We
went down that street like a couple of Roman gladiators pacing a hungry
bear, and, by tangling Ole up in the parkings again, managed to get home
a few yards ahead.
There was an atmosphere of arnica and dejection in the house when we got
there. Ill-health seemed to be rampant. "Did you lose him?" asked Bangs
hopefully from behind a big bandage.
"Lose him?" says I with a snort. "Oh, yes, we lost him all right. He
loses just like a foxhound. That's him, falling over the front steps
now. You can stay and entertain him; I'm going upstairs."
Everybody came along. We piled chairs on the stairs and listened while
Ole felt his way over the porch. In about a minute he found the door.
Then he came right in. I had locked the door, but I had neglected to
reënforce it with concrete and boiler iron. Ole wore part of the frame
in with him.
"Come on, yu Baked Pies!" he shouted.
"You're in the wrong house," squeaked that little fool, Jimmy Skelton.
"Yu kent fule me!" said Ole, crashing around the loafing-room. "Aye yust
can tal das haus by har skagaroot smell. Come on, yu leetle fallers! Aye
bet Aye inittyate yu some, tu!"
By this time he had found the stairs and was plowing through the
furniture. We retired to the third floor. When twenty-seven fellows go
up a three-foot stairway at once it necessarily makes some noise. Ole
heard us and kept right on coming.
We grabbed a bureau and a bed and barricaded the staircase. There was a
ladder to the attic. I was the last man up and my heart was giving my
ribs all kinds of massage treatment before I got up. We hauled up the
ladder just as Ole kicked the bureau downstairs, and then we watched him
charge over our beautiful third-floor dormitory, leaving ruin in his
wake.
Maybe he would have been satisfied with breaking the furniture. But, of
course, a few of us had to sneeze. Ole hunted those sneezes all over the
third floor. He couldn't reach them, but he sat down on the wreck
underneath them.
"Aye ent know vere yu fallers ban," he said, "but Aye kin vait. Aye har
yu, yu Baked Pies! Aye gat yu yet, by yimminy! Yust come on down ven yu
ban ready."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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